Consonantal changes

The vocalization of /l/ mentioned under social class is a consonantal change that is very advanced in New Zealand. In this change, post-vocalic /l/ (also called ‘dark’ /l/) which is articulated with the back of the tongue raised, loses its tongue tip contact so that it is articulated as the vowel . Women from the higher social class in the Canterbury Corpus still use an alveolar lateral when this sound occurs in a word list just over 60% of the time, but the younger, lower social class speakers, both male and female, now vocalize /l/ almost 70% of the time even in this most formal of contexts. The rate of /l/-vocalization is higher still in casual speech. /l/-vocalization has reached the level of consciousness within New Zealand, and people write letters of complaint to the paper about it (one writer complained about seeing a sign advertising warnuts for sale). /l/ has not yet been lost in most words, so that child and chide are still distinct. Vocalization of postvocalic /l/ is parallel to the loss of post-vocalic /r/, and eventually the /l/ in child may be completely lost so that child and chide become homophonous as father and farther are in NZE.

Another consonantal change that is moving quickly in NZE is the affrication of / tr/ and /str/. The /t/ in /tr/ has always partially devoiced the following /r/ so that the cluster has been pronounced with friction in NZE. Now, however, the lips are being rounded, and the cluster is pronounced as though it were spelt chr, so that tree is now pronounced . /str/ is also affected so that street may be pronounced  or even . People are not yet aware of this sound change, so we have not yet found letters complaining about it. The younger lower class males are in the lead with affrication for more than 60% of word list tokens. The other younger speakers and the older lower class males affricate approximately 40% of tokens, while the older female professional speakers affricate less than 20%.

TH-fronting, where mother is pronounced as /mΛvə/, is still avoided in formal contexts by people from the higher social classes. Its use is spreading rapidly among younger speakers from the lower social classes, women as well as men. It now reaches just over the 5% level for young, lower class males in the Canterbury Corpus reading tasks, but is considerably more common in the casual conversation. The first word to be pronounced with /f/ for most speakers is with. If a speaker does not say /wɪf/ , they will probably not use /f/ for /θ/ in other words either. There are already two possible pronunciations for with in NZE, /wɪθ/ and /wɪð/. It has been suggested that the variability in the pronunciation of this word created the conditions for the development of the new pronunciation, /wɪf/ or /wɪv/ . Informal observation indicates that words like the and them are often spelt ve and vem by young children who are just learning to read and spell.

Another consonantal change that is also still not common in formal speech is flapping or tapping of /t/ in intervocalic position in words like city or letter. Although it is very common in the conversations, only 11% of the Canterbury Corpus speakers use flaps in the word lists. However, each set of words in these word lists is preceded by a number which the speakers read out. Although only 11% of speakers use flaps on the words in the list, 55% use flaps in some of the numbers, especially thirteen, fourteen and thirty. Speakers do not consider that the numbers are part of the word list, and use a more casual style in reading them thus demonstrating that /t/ flaps are used much more often in more casual speech. As expected, older, higher social class women seldom use them. In the Canterbury Corpus, the lower social class men, older as well as younger, are leading this change, though the younger, lower class women are close behind them. There is little indication yet that the younger higher class women are involved, though other research has shown them using a high percentage of /t/ flaps in casual speech.